UMAC

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This article needs attention from an expert in Cryptography. The specific problem is: confusion between UMAC as a general concept and the RFC 4418 UMAC algorithm; Need someone to split this into “universal hashing in MAC" and "UMAC and friends".. See the talk page for details. WikiProject Cryptography may be able to help recruit an expert. (September 2019)

In cryptography, a message authentication code based on universal hashing, or UMAC, is a type of message authentication code (MAC) calculated choosing a hash function from a class of hash functions according to some secret (random) process and applying it to the message. The resulting digest or fingerprint is then encrypted to hide the identity of the hash function used. As with any MAC, it may be used to simultaneously verify both the data integrity and the authenticity of a message. In contrast to traditional MACs, which are serializable, UMAC can be executed in parallel. Thus as machines continue to offer more parallel processing capabilities, the speed of implementing UMAC will increase. ^[1]

A specific type of UMAC, also commonly referred to just UMAC, is specified in RFC 4418, it has provable cryptographic strength and is usually a lot less computationally intensive than other MACs. UMAC's design is optimized for 32-bit architectures with SIMD support, with a performance of 1 CPU cycle per byte (cpb) with SIMD and 2 cpb without SIMD. A closely related variant of UMAC that is optimized for 64-bit architectures is given by VMAC, which has been submitted to the IETF as a draft (draft-krovetz-vmac-01) but never gathered enough attention for becoming a standardized RFC.